NAI Antivirus Apps Tap ProtectionPilot System

Network Associates Inc. is moving to strengthen its position in the rapidly growing midmarket with the introduction of two product suites designed for small and midsize businesses.

Both McAfee Active VirusScan Small Business Edition and McAfee Active Virus Defense Small Business Edition include the companys new ProtectionPilot technology, which is designed to help administrators deploy and maintain the products more easily. The new addition is essentially a scaled-down version of NAIs ePO (ePolicy Orchestrator) tool for enterprises, which acts as the central management console for most of the companys security products.

ProtectionPilot gives administrators step-by-step instructions during installation for tasks such as setting up group policies. The system can be configured to have one policy for an entire organization.

"This is much more ready to run than ePO is," said Rob Eatwell, director of product marketing at NAI, based in Santa Clara, Calif. "Some of the enterprise tools are a bit too complicated for the SMB market. They cant be expected to create their own policies for an IDS [intrusion detection system]."

ProtectionPilot helps customers manage the process of obtaining and pushing out antivirus updates to users. Like ePO, the system can be configured to check for updates at the customers discretion. ProtectionPilot downloads updates from NAI and pushes them to individual users.

The technology can be used to enforce policies on users machines. Just as it checks with NAI for updates, ProtectionPilot also polls user PCs to check for the presence of antivirus software and to ensure that it is up-to-date.

The Active VirusScan suite includes McAfee VirusScan Enterprise and NetShield for NetWare.

The Active Virus Defense offering comprises those two products as well as McAfee GroupShield and McAfee WebShield. GroupShield includes content-filtering capabilities, and WebShield performs spam blocking and some content filtering.

Both offerings can also be managed by NAI through its ASAP managed services, Eatwell said.

The suites are scheduled to ship April 19.

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